Germany Guide
Baden-Württemberg
Tübingen
TÜBINGEN, 40km south of Stuttgart, makes its first appearance in the history books in 1078, but the town didn't really blossom until four hundred years later when Württemberg Count Eberhard established a university here. Much of this charming medieval city still remains, with twisting cobbled lanes of bright half-timbered houses gathering below a fortress, but what really marks the place out is the university, one of Germany's best. It injects this venerable city with modern and youthful energy; one-in-four of the town's 70,000 population is directly connected with the university, so a local quip runs that the town doesn't have a university – it is one. Its celebrity scholars include Philipp Melancthon, who taught here before moving to Wittenberg; Goethe, who published his first works here; the philosopher Hegel; astronomer Johannes Keppler; and psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer. More recently Joseph Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict XVI – taught theology here and had a famously hard-line against 1960s student radicalism. A scholarly atmosphere persists around town, but that doesn't mean the students don't know how to let their hair down – the bar scene is good and punting on the Neckar good fun – and everything's much less touristy than in regional rival Heidelberg.
No view better captures idyllic Tübingen, muse of poets and writers, than that from the Eberhardsbrücke. It overlooks the Platanenallee, a leafy boulevard on a narrow man-made island – certainly among the most attractive uses for landfill, which formed the basis of its construction. Punts pass serenely by and a row of pink-, mustard- and cream-coloured houses that prop each other up on the opposite riverbank look on. Behind them the old town rises up to gather around two focal squares, the Holzmarkt and the Markt from which various small streets fan out, some climbing to Schloss Hohentübingen.